Links to Information about Barter

IRTA is a non-profit corporation established to foster the interests of
the commercial barter industry in the U.S. and around the world. IRTA's web
site gives statistics on the total value of goods bartered by North American
companies.

Free2Xchange.com is a community project with the aim of giving people
have an alternative to fiat money systems. As well as exchanging goods people
can use the system to offer services, including their time.

Ormita acts as a clearinghouse in 5 continents for the trade of excess
capacities, goods and services and works through a combination of manual
clearing, online e-commerce trading, 24 hour telephone brokering and
independent licensees and brokers.

The purpose of the Global Offset and Countertrade Association (G.O.C.A.)
is to promote trade and commerce between companies around the world and their
foreign customers through a greater understanding of countertrade and
offset.

The Freecycle Network is an international grassroots and entirely
nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in
their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of
landfills.

XO Limited produces software for the barter, credit union and alternative
currency market world-wide. It offers a "pay anyone" facility, where members
of any barter exchange can send barter dollars to anyone who has a mobile
phone or email, even non-barter exchange members, thus making barter more
"liquid."

A guide offering helpful suggestions and advice on how and why you should
barter. It deals mainly with reciprocal bartering.

The History and Relevance of Barter

Barter is often regarded as an old-fashioned means of exchange that was
superseded because money is far more efficient. After all, in a monetary system
an apple grower who needs shoes simply has to find a cobbler. In a pure barter
system the apple grower would have to find not just any cobbler but one who
happened to want apples at that time. Thus in virtually all civilizations,
except the Incas,
money came to play an important role.

However the inconvenience of barter was just one factor, and in most places
was probably not the most significant one, in the origin of
money.

Barter and money are not necessarily completely incompatible. One of the
most important improvements over the simplest forms of early barter was first
the tendency to select one or two particular items in preference to others so
that the preferred barter items became partly accepted because of their
qualities in acting as media of exchange although, of course, they still could
be used for their primary purpose of directly satisfying the wants of the
traders concerned. (Quoted from History of Money
page 10).

Barter still often plays an important role in trade with countries whose
currencies are not readily convertible, e.g. the communist countries during the
cold war. At the retail level barter has become the main means of exchange on
occasions when currencies have collapsed completely as a result of
hyperinflation, e.g. in Germany after the two world wars.

In normal circumstances retail barter is much less important but its
persistence has puzzled some economists. The magazine Exchange and Mart
devoted partly to barter has been published in Britain every Thursday since
1868. Jevons noticed it in its early years and was obviously puzzled that any
such publication, partly dependent on serving such a long obsolete purpose as
barter, should appear to have any use to anyone. We must assume,
concluded Jevons, ... that the printing press can bring about, in some
degree, the double coincidence necessary to an act of barter. (Quoted by
Glyn Davies in A History of Money,
page 22).

If the printing press could, as Jevons acknowledged, make barter more
feasible then the computer can certainly do so even more effectively as
demonstrated by the links below. It is worth noting however, that some of these
computerised barter schemes do use units of account to facilitate comparison of
the values of the goods and services offered and therefore in such cases the
barter circles are using a form of money, albeit one with very restricted
functions.

It is also worth noting that the free exchange of information that the
Internet facilitates could also be regarded as a form of gift-exchange, a
version of barter. See my essay on Should Information Be
Free?, a version of which was published in the inaugural British edition of
Wired.

by Frederick Mann. Many so-called barter clubs are not pure barter
systems as they utilize their own forms of barter currency as media of
exchange. Mann says that his article is now largely of historical interest
because his proposals have been overtaken by the development of alternative
currencies such as e-gold.